Serious Crime Bill [Lords]

I associate myself absolutely with my hon. Friend’s remarks about PC Jon Henry and about our fully implementing the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006 and all the provisions in it that deal with knife crime. This Bill deals with serious crime rather than violent crime, but as I said yesterday at Home Office questions, it is not an abdication of our responsibility to say that the use of knives by young people will not be dealt with just by legislation. As I think the whole House broadly agrees, we have made it clear that education, awareness and a range of other issues must come into play in terms of getting rid of the culture in which it is considered smart or otherwise to carry knives and associated weapons. It would be wrong to stand here as a Home Office Minister or as a Minister of any description and to say that somehow, by magic, legislation will deal with this matter. As far as we can push the legislative dimension, we have done so. It would also be fair to say that at least some elements of quite how serious we are about knife crime need to be understood a bit more fully by colleagues in the judiciary. I do not mean that in any disrespectful sense, but just to put the point on the record. We will take forward as much as we can all that is in the Violent Crime Reduction Act. I perfectly understand why my hon. Friend used the interesting hook of the data sharing and data matching provisions in the Bill. Her point about the immigration department and sharing information across government is not in the strictest terms covered by the Bill, because that point should already and does pertain. She will know that we are trying across government, and certainly across the Home Office, to do more and more about the integrity of assorted databases on the immigration side and everywhere else. Data sharing and data matching across government and all law enforcement agencies, and not just in terms of this Bill but far more generally, will be the absolute key to tackling many of these crimes and many of these issues. My hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not comment on the immigration status or otherwise of the individual of interest to the police in the case of the tragic murder of PC Jon Henry. I simply cannot go down that road, but I take her point none the less. As I was saying, it will be appropriate for the Committee to debate what we do about data matching and data sharing in the context of serious organised crime, and I think that everyone agrees that, as technology and the use of data develop all the more, data sharing and data matching across government and the law enforcement agencies will be central to the fight against crime, not least the serious and organised crime of the future. That point has already been well made by a range of people far more experienced than I, but it is widely accepted that a Government of whatever party will collectively need to catch up with the use of data across all walks of life. The Data Protection Act 1998 will cover these measures and the Information Commissioner, in his role as regulator and guardian of the Data Protection Act, will also cover them. The first data protection principle of the Act requires, among other things, that personal data should be processed fairly and lawfully, and all the provisions in the Bill are designed to comply with the Act. The data sharing provisions in clauses 63 to 66 create a legal gateway through which public authorities may share information for the purposes of preventing fraud. This sharing is to be done through a specified anti-fraud organisation, of which there could be several, and will enable information to be shared between the public and private sectors in a way that is not always possible now. There is as yet no specified anti-fraud organisation—and arrangements made by them may vary—but CIFAS, the UK’s anti-fraud service, is an example of a body that could be so specified. Members of CIFAS, who are typically financial institutions, keep a database of persons who are suspected of having attempted to commit fraud against them. Other members may then check applications for services against that database to see whether they should have reservations. CIFAS members report having avoided fraud losses of £790 million in 2006. That clearly shows the worth of the database. During discussions of the provision in another place, Baroness Scotland committed the Government to introducing an amendment requiring the Secretary of State to produce a code of practice that all public authorities sharing the specified anti-fraud organisation must have regard to. Liberty has welcomed our intention to do so, and that will be dealt with in Committee. The data-matching provisions in clause 67 involve placing the national fraud initiative, a biennial Audit Commission-run exercise, on a statutory footing. The national fraud initiative is a proven tool in the fight against fraud. In the last cycle, more than £111 million of fraud and overpayments were identified. We made a number of amendments in the other place to strengthen the controls and safeguards within the measures and to include statutory involvement of the Information Commissioner. The Audit Commission will not be able to use the powers to profile individuals and predict who might commit fraud in the future. The provisions are about preventing and detecting the fraud that is happening right now. They create a proportionate regime that complies with the Data Protection Act and the UK’s human rights obligations, while preventing and detecting fraud losses suffered by the public purse.